Words you’ll never see me use in restaurant reviews

2of2Doritos Locos Tacos at Taco Bell Cantina in S.F.Photo: Jen Fedrizzi / Special to the Chronicle

When I first thought up this idea — to lay out all the words that I tend to stay away from when I write about food and the people who make it — I didn’t think the list would be very long. (Honestly, I just thought “ethnic” would be the one, since that’s a word that’s been a thorn in my side for years.) Of course, there are certain words that can make people’s skin crawl, like “mouthgasm” and “noms.” But after conversations with colleagues at The Chronicle and in the food world at large, and after brainstorming on my own, I realized that, as a writer who aims to improve my political consciousness and empathy toward others, there is a lot of use in simply thinking about how my word choice can help or hinder that goal.

Owing to a mixture of myth, prejudice and marketing, food writing in particular is often victim to strange verbiage that fails to describe accurately or fairly. One of my great hopes with my own writing is for it to better reflect and respect the way real people live in the world.

Some might call this self-censorship or being too politically correct. But, as a writer, I think pretending that word choice doesn’t matter would undermine my whole profession. Moreover, if caring about other people means I have to find a better and more creative word than “addictive” to describe how good a bag of chips is, I’m fine with the small inconvenience of that.

Here’s what I’ve got so far. Full disclosure: Many of these are words and phrases that I’ve used in the past. What would you add to the list?

In addition to being overly dramatic, it seems really callous to write that a bowl of bean dip is “like crack.” No matter how delicious something might be, its effect on me is nothing close to what crack does to people and their families. It’s supposed to be funny and edgy to compare a gourmet cupcake to crack because of how far the chi-chi bakery I’m standing in is from the kind of community that has historically been devastated by the crack epidemic. The ignorance is the joke.

One interesting example of its persistence is in the way we talk about Momofuku Milk Bar’s “Crack Pie.” Writers have called its creator, chef Christina Tosi, a “crack dealer” and used the language of addiction to describe the dish. Honestly, the company should have done the right thing and changed it by now.

I’ve used this before in a few contexts, and I realized after talking to friends and colleagues who struggle with real-world addiction that it’s a word that I need to ease out of my food writing. There are so many other ways to say that a food appeals to us; we don’t need to glorify or make light of what other people go through to make that point.

Guilt

I don’t use this word because of the harm it does to our relationship to food, especially because “guilt” in this context never actually refers to things that do carry ethical weight, like cannibalism or stealing food from the hungry. Why should anyone besides the Hamburglar, who seems to enjoy the act of larceny for the sheer thrill of it, feel guilty about their food choices? The overwhelmingly majority of the time I’ve encountered this word in food writing or a marketing context has been about diet food, mainly directed toward girls and women: “guilt-free snacks,” “ice cream without the guilt,” and so on. Criminalizing the everyday act of eating reinforces the idea that we need to punish ourselves for wanting food when we’re hungry, which encourages us to develop really screwed-up and disordered attitudes toward our own bodies. Relatedly, I hate every time Great British Bake-off judge Prue Leith says that a pastry is good if it’s “worth the calories.”

RACISM

Ethnic

I can’t count how many times I’ve participated in conversations about using the word “ethnic” in food writing. Though it still makes plenty of appearances in both journalism and everyday chitchat, the term makes no sense: Who and what do we mean when we say “ethnic restaurants”? Do we mean Restaurant Jeanne d’Arc, which serves souffles and other traditional French foods? Or Bill’s Hamburgers, the Richmond neighborhood institution that specializes in that all-American delicacy? Odds are, that’s not it at all. We’re talking about pho shops, taquerias, Indian buffets and Jamaican grills, places that we associate with the lowbrow and with communities of color. But don’t all humans have an ethnicity that they identify with, even vaguely? The imprecision of the word — and the assumption that it doesn’t apply equally to people and cuisines associated with Europe or white America — gives me such a headache.

The Grand Marnier souffle at Jeanne d'Arc.

Photo: Jessica Christian / The Chronicle

Authentic

Like “ethnic,” authenticity operates like a shackle. I refuse to use it as a qualitative judgment on restaurants because of how meaningless it can be. Often, I find that the impulse to use it comes from a place of assumed expertise: I know that a rendition of a dish is authentic because I can differentiate the real stuff from fakery. But if we’re to assume that food is an art, can’t we allow it to change its shape? If art speaks to a milieu, a personal story or psychological state, should we punish it for not 100 percent reflecting our own memories? Instead of judging food based on authenticity, I find that doing the work to understand the goals of the chef or restaurateur can be more fruitful both for the diner and the food industry as a whole.

Kaffir lime

The Chronicle’s style guide suggests “makrut” or “magrut” in place of “kaffir” when referring to Citrus hystrix, a plant whose leaves are common ingredients in Southeast Asian cuisines. Its etymological origin seems a mystery, though there is some evidence to suggest that it came from association with a Sri Lankan ethnic group. The trouble comes from the fact that the word is a cognate for a slur used by white colonists to refer to Black Africans in South Africa. Though the spirit of the word likely has very little to do with the latter context, my reasoning is the same as the reason why you’re never going to catch me casually saying or writing the word “niggardly.” There are so many other words.

The next big, the new

In my view, calling a food “the new X” is useful shorthand. At the same time, it encourages a trend-focused way of thinking about cuisine that I think shortchanges everyone, from purveyors to diners. There’s an assumption of interchangeability with this phrasing, indicating only that you should be chasing this next shiny thing because it’s like the last shiny thing. Is there an actual human story behind this that deserves fleshing out? Is there really any utility in writing that “pho is the new ramen” that is worth the implicit argument that Asian cultures and cuisines are all the same?

GENDER

Slutty

What makes food “slutty”? Does it lie in the visual parallels between genitalia and an oozy egg yolk dripping over a brioche bun, the forbidden aspect of eating ortolan or the cheapness of a Taco Bell Doritos Loco taco? As a metaphor, it works by bringing together the aspects of whoredom into the food we eat, emphasizing attributes that our culture associates with loose women. It works well, but I don’t use it because it reinforces misogynistic and literally objectifying ideas about women who have sex.

Man food, girly drinks

Forcing food into the gender binary seems really unnecessary, though I’m sure many of us can easily define what the categories of “man food” or a “girl drink” might include. Putting even the tiniest bit of critical pressure on the idea collapses it, especially when you begin to realize the futility of trying to attribute some intrinsic masculine quality to a plate of nachos. It feels strange to have to articulate this in 2019, but any human being of any gender can eat a salad or drink a Tom Collins: doing so does not and should not give them an identity crisis or cause others to shame them. Side note: I lost it when Jiro Ono, the sushi chef featured in “Jiro Dreams of Sushi,” admitted to giving women customers smaller portions of food during his omakase. They pay the same, don’t they?

ECONOMICS

Cheap eats

Earlier this year, Washington Post reporter Tim Carman announced that he would be changing the name of his column, the $20 Diner. He had a few reasons for doing this, which he articulates well in that piece. The “cheap eats” designation works along a similar vein, privileging price point over all of the other potentially good things about a restaurant. Affordability does matter to me, especially as a Millennial who can see moths flying out of her savings account. But I think there is a way to talk about restaurants that are more affordable without encouraging readers to think of them as cheap first and interesting second.

Up-and-coming neighborhood

I find that food writing about restaurants and cafes that open in gentrifying neighborhoods tends to shorthand what’s been happening in those areas with fuzzy phrasing like this. It’s very much the language of real estate marketing: cute and optimistic in the way that “fixer-upper” and “cozy” can be deceptive. In the neighborhood context, “up-and-coming” means that they’re in the process of kicking all of the working-class people out. Instead of using terminology like this to soften what’s actually happening in the real world, I’ll be honest and name gentrification when I see it.

Soleil Ho’s tenure as The Chronicle's Restaurant Critic began in 2019. She was previously a freelance food and pop culture writer, a podcast maker, and restaurant chef. Her seminal work, the Racist Sandwich podcast, covered the myriad ways in which food intersects with race, class, and gender.